Chat evaluation Initiative

Community
1

Problem statement and why we need to take this initiative.

The GNOME community is fragmented between IRC, Matrix, Rocketchat, and Telegram which creates tension between teams and makes communication and organization difficult. This is not a new problem and we have tried to solve it before but were not able to reach a solution that worked. The scope of this issue is very large and we’ve learned from our previous efforts that in order to reach a solution we need time to collect input from the community and evaluate our options.

How will GNOME handle the process?

A staff member of the GNOME foundation will work with community stakeholders to evaluate the different communication platforms. This will be done using a multi level approach which includes:

  1. Gathering functional requirements
  2. Interviewing community members from specific teams (see list below)
  3. Surveying the community on needs and preferences.

Gathering Functional Requirements

Based on a gitlap issue Decide on essential requirements for GNOME's chat infrastructure (#6) · Issues · Teams / Engagement / Initiatives / Chat Evaluation · GitLab a list of chat platform requirements has been created to compare and contrast the functionality of each system.

Interviewing Community Members

We will conduct different calls with people from our community and with a number of teams to hear their opinions on each chat platform, learn what tools they need to work effectively, and get their perspective on which platform is the best fit for the Foundation.

All feedback we will receive will be shared publicly and anonymously on discourse.

The teams we will reach out to are:

  • GTK
  • Design
  • Release
  • GNOME sys admins
  • GNOME i18ln
  • Engagement
  • Mantainers
  • Documentation team
  • Advisory Board

All the meetings will be published at events.gnome.org. If you belong to a team that’s not listed above and would still like to share your ideas with us please email kprogri@gnome.org.

Survey

For individuals who can not participate during their team’s meeting time or for those who prefer to remain anonymous, we will distribute a survey for those who wish to share their thoughts. The results of this survey will be shared on discourse, along with the interview notes.

We want to make this process as inclusive as possible and we will do our best to ensure that our initiative reaches everyone so we are able to collect as much data as possible.

Decision

The final decision will be made by the Foundation Board of Directors, on recommendation from the Executive Director. It will be based on the feedback sought above, but also will consider the ability for the Foundation to provide the service in a sustainable, effective and legally compliant way.

8 Likes
2

I’ve been told that this list of requirements is outdated (after I commented on them). Is there an updated list available somewhere?

Cheers

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Hello :wave:

What I meant is that when people got involved in this issue, the IRC<->Matrix bridge was really really terrible. Some expectations might have changed now, given we have been improving the experience a little.

There still are open pain points which need to be fixed for the experience to be good on both sides of the bridge, but things are better. They key idea here is that in the Chat Evaluation issue people expressed concerns over things that have improved since.

The “no bridge please” strict requirement might have softened a bit. Even if there are still people convinced that we should remove it right away :slight_smile:

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Is what you’re saying that the list of requirements might be different now? :face_with_monocle:

It would still be nice to know what the current list of requirements is, so it’s possible to evaluate against it.

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@hadess

Here is the list created : Nextcloud
I forgot to attach it in the issue before.

Was this what you were looking for?

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This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

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The Chat Evaluation Survey is out now: Chat evaluation survey
Check the discourse topic for more information

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We announced recently the results of our Chat Evaluation Initiative as on our official statement published here.

Thank you for taking part in the initiative and for answering our surveys!.